Electronics Technician 2nd Class Jacob Drake receives the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal in July for his efforts during Mid-Cycle Inspection (MCI) aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided missile-class destroyer USS John S. McCain. Drake, a graduate of Triad High School, is among the sailors missing after a crash involving the USS McCain. Photo from U.S. Navy. Contributed photo

— UPDATE @ 1:37 p.m.

Friends and family continue to gather for the funeral of Navy sailor Jacob Drake Saturday morning in West Jefferson.

Fellow sailors have turned out to pay their respects as well as a group of Blue Star Mothers who have children in the Navy.

Petty Officer Third Class Nathan Rafferty, 28, drove with another sailor from Norfolk, Virginia for the visitation and funeral.

"Whenever you go through boot amp you get really close to them he was a great kid and everyone just flooded to him," Rafferty said.

A group of Blue Star Mothers including Nan Hayes from Marysville told our reporter they are attending because they to have children serving overseas.

EARLIER REPORT

The Champaign County sailor who was killed when the USS John McCain collided with a merchant ship near Singapore last month will be remembered today at his funeral.

Family and friends will gather at the Rader-McDonald-Tidd Funeral Home in West Jefferson in Madison County. A public visitation will begin at 10 a.m. and his funeral will start at 2 p.m. He will be given military honors at that time.

Drake was missing for several days after the crash on the South China Sea.

His body landed in Ohio on Tuesday and he was escorted to West Jefferson by emergency vehicles and veterans. Many honored Drake in downtown West Jefferson by standing on the side of the road as the procession went by.

Book chronicles heroism of war correspondents like OSU’s Cecil Brown

WASHINGTON — As he scanned the names of the past winners of the Peabody award for broadcast journalism, Reed Smith, a professor of journalism at Georgia Southern University, came across the name Cecil Brown of CBS and admitted he “had never heard of him before.”

It began a four-year effort by Smith that culminated last November in the release of his book, “Cecil Brown: The Murrow Boy Who Became Broadcasting’s Crusader for Truth.” It’s the story of an Ohio State University student from 1929 who reached the pinnacle of broadcast journalism during World War II and the era of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Smith became fascinated with Brown’s story and it is easy to see why. As a CBS Radio broadcaster in Singapore in December 1941 he nearly lost his life when Japanese torpedo bombers sank the British battlecruiser Repulse in the South China Sea. Brown was a correspondent on the Repulse.

His gripping minute-by-minute account of the disaster for CBS, which also included the destruction of the British battleship Prince of Wales, earned him the Peabody award and transformed him into one of the best-known correspondents of World War II.

“There were upwards of a thousand sailors who died during that attack,” Smith said. “He was not wounded during attack and fortunately was able to get off the ship. A British sailor reached out in the water off a Carley Float and grabbed him. Cecil thought he had just about had it. It was pretty miraculous.”

Brown also was known for his legendary battles with Italian and British censors in World II as they tried to block or alter his broadcasts, prompting Smith to describe Brown as “very feisty. He was a big First Amendment guy and he became quite exasperated when anybody tried to curtail his freedom of the press.”

For Smith, 68, it was a case of one Ohio man meeting another. Smith, a graduate of Ohio University who earned an M.A. from Bowling Green and then a Ph.D from Ohio University, grew up in New Concord. Brown, who died in 1987, was raised in Warren, married a woman from Columbus who is still alive in Los Angeles at age 104.

He left Ohio State nine hours short of a degree in 1929 and worked as a reporter for a number of years before Edward R. Murrow hired him at CBS Radio in 1940 and assigned him to cover the war from Rome.

Brown reported in an entirely different era than today when journalists are under relentless attacks from President Donald Trump and many conservatives.

“It tells us the public view of journalism has changed drastically over the past 70 years,” Smith said. “Murrow and Cecil were seen as heroes. They were brave men in the war zone telling the truth for what was going on and continuing to get in trouble for telling the truth.”

Work to start next month on $10.5 million Wright-Patt gateway

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Gate 16A, a commercial truck screening checkpoint, will be consolidated with a new Gate 26A in 2019 in a $10.5 million construction project. JIM WITMER | 2011 STAFF FILE PHOTO(Jim Witmer)

Jim Witmer

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE — A new $10.5 million gateway that will consolidate two Wright-Patterson entrances into one is set to begin construction next month, a base spokesman says.

A new Gate 26A, a few hundred yards from the current one, would replace a commercial delivery entrance at Gate 16A off Ohio 444, and the existing Gate 26A off Ohio 235 near the entrance to the 445th Airlift Wing headquarters.

The new entrance way off Ohio 235 will be sited between Sandhill Road and Circle Drive, according to Wright-Patterson spokesman Daryl Mayer.

Work was scheduled for completion at the end of next year, the base said.

Base spokesman Daryl Mayer said no orders had been issued to send civil service employees home and the base was awaiting official word the shutdown — which lasted less than nine hours — was over.

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which closed after opening for four hours on the first day of a three-day shutdown last month, opened Friday morning as scheduled, according to spokeswoman Diana Bachert.

Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park locations at the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center in Dayton and Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center near Wright-Patterson also were open.

The partial federal government shutdown was the second in less than three weeks, the last occurring Jan.20-22.

Wright-Patterson sent home 8,600 Wright-Patterson civil service workers on a one-day work week furlough Monday, Jan. 22.

Overnight Thursday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took the floor of the Senate to decry the increase in debt spending, which delayed a vote on the two-year deal until after the midnight shutdown deadline.